There’s a notion gaining ground that President Obama, by opting for a troop increase in Afghanistan, is somehow faltering on campaign promises and thus “betraying his base.” What nonsense. Obama never said he’d withdraw troops from Afghanistan. If anything, he said the opposite. This CNN report is from July 21, 2008, before he had even secured the Democratic nomination:
“The Afghan government needs to do more. But we have to understand that the situation is precarious and urgent here in Afghanistan. And I believe this has to be our central focus, the central front, on our battle against terrorism,” Obama said Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“For at least a year now, I have called for two additional brigades, perhaps three,” he told CBS. “I think it’s very important that we unify command more effectively to coordinate our military activities. But military alone is not going to be enough.”
We’ll see what Obama has to say on Tuesday, but it’s pretty clear that his current stance is consistent with that of the campaign. Obama is not betraying the base; the base is betraying him.
And the notion peddled by the right, that Obama’s speeches were all lofty feel-good rhetoric, devoid of substance and realism? Also nonsense. The speeches were tough and detailed on national security. If they hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have joined you, my liberal and lefty friends, in waking up at 5 a.m. to campaign for the man. I knew what I was voting for. Didn’t you?
I am not denying that Obama’s Afghan move is fraught with difficulties, the most obvious one being the Karzai government’s lack of legitimacy. But awaiting Tuesday’s announcement, I am prepared to give the Obama strategy my qualified support. Afghanistan is not Iraq, nor is it Vietnam. Like Jeff Weintraub, I’m deeply ambivalent about the way forward. But Ahmed Rashid’s comments in The New York Review of Books remind us of some of the stakes involved. Liberals and lefties often note how the U.S. abandoned Afghanistan following the anti-Soviet jihad; curiously, the same people seem to be advocating abandonment now.
In a letter to the editor in Wednesday’s NYT, Nancy Dickeman of Seattle wrote: “But the lives of the Afghans, the women and children bombed at wedding parties, command our consideration, and ask us to set down our bombs, drones and bullets.” This is the sort of poorly informed guff Obama will have to address more directly after Tuesday, or perhaps on Tuesday. What commands our consideration is the fact, established by the UN, that the majority of Afghan civilian deaths in recent months are attributable to insurgent forces. The Afghans themselves know this. In polling released earlier this year, cited by Jeff Weintraub and detailed here, 63 percent of Afghans support the presence of U.S. forces (a decline from a high of 78 percent); only seven percent view the Taliban favorably (so much for the popular insurgency theory); 47 percent view the U.S. favorably.
Ms. Dickeman and many antiwar advocates would have us believe that the U.S. and only the U.S. is to blame for war and violence, and it could all stop with a stroke of Obama’s pen. This is naive, it’s irresponsible, and thankfully it’s far from being the current president’s worldview.
2 Comments
THANK YOU, David. The way my lefty friends were carrying on, I thought perhaps I was the ONLY ONE who heard Obama say during the campaign that the situation in Afghanistan required renewed focus and effort from the U.S.
Thank you for restoring my faith in liberal intellect.
And Obama also said that he would step up the fight in Pakistan. John McCain criticized him for this – from the left!